Apache Talking IPv6

A technical tutorial on setting up Apache to serve HTTP requests over IPv6 and some preliminary benchmarking results.

Conclusion

IPv6 is becoming a reality. For the next few years, we need
to be able to support both IPv4 and IPv6 on our application servers
before the complete transition to IPv6 occurs. The developers of
Apache are aware of this, and they have already built in support
for IPv6 in the Apache code. Previously, the support for IPv6 was
in the form of a downloadable patch (from the Kame Project, for
instance) that you would apply to the source tree.

As the benchmarking results suggest, serving documents over
IPv6 is slightly slower (in terms of requests/second) than serving
them over IPv4; however, this is understandable because the IPv6
support is still in its early stages. As the development advances,
Apache is expected to reach and exceed the level of performance it
achieved with IPv4 to remain the preferred web server in the
world.

Acknowledgements

Ericsson Research (Open Architecture Research Lab) for
supporting our work with Linux and open-source software and for
approving the publication of this article.

Ibrahim Haddad
(Ibrahim.Haddad@Ericsson.com)is
a researcher at the Ericsson Research Open Architecture Lab in
Montréal, Canada, where he is primarily involved in
researching carrier-class server nodes for real-time all-IP
networks. He is currently a Dr.Sc. Candidate at Concordia
University.

David Gordon
(davidgordonca@yahoo.ca)
has completed his co-op term at Ericsson Research Canada as part of
the team working to support IPv6 on near telecom-grade Linux
clusters. He is currently a Computer Science student at the
University of Sherbrooke.